I've always thought the "strict invitation trees" or vouch trees would be an interesting way to moderate a community, even before the LLM era. A user can vouch for an unlimited number of new accounts, but if more than 10% of the vouched accounts are banned or flagged down the line, the parent voucher acct is also banned/flagged.

Since it creates a tree structure, you can wipe out entire armies of bot/spam/otherwise accounts by following the vouches up the tree.

My guess is that sooner or later we're going to one or the other of these:

* dead online communities

* highly-invasive, government-mandated "prove you are a human" requirements in order to participate in online communities

Wait for the EU AI Act to require text watermarking in August. It will work, and it will be effective -- not because it'll be impossible to circumvent, but because all the big SaaSes will have to adopt it, and the hurdle of stripping it back out will filter out the vast majority of the sloppers.

Im not a crypto person, but I was intrigued by Chia. They generate their coins based on allocating disk space. So if you have a bit of free space, you can fill it with plots and play the lotto.

The intriguing part is that I think it works against scaling. The incremental cost for me to use the 500GB of free space on my disk is $0, but someone scaling a bot farm has to buy all their space.

Real people tend to have a lot more idle capacity than optimized, scaled businesses, so any kind of proof of idle capacity seems like it would disadvantage bot farms.

I’ve also thought that proof of collateral spending would be a good system. For example, you buy groceries and the store gives you a token saying you spent $X of real world money. Those tokens help show you're not a bot. Keeping that system honest and equitable would be extremely difficult though.

Maybe schools could give kids tokens for attendance. It sounds kind of dumb, but who knows.

Charge $10 for an account, like Something Awful.

It'd be interesting to see how lobste.rs fares with all this.

Probably all three of those. Tildes and fediverse instances do the first, resurgence pending for the second, and lastly non-mainstream social media sites have no SEO garbage by default.